2000 Camphor Aroma Sheng Puerh

Having been on a bit of an aged tea kick lately, despite the seasonal influx of new tea, I decided to pick up a sample of this with my most recent Essence of Tea order. I’ve brewed it gong fu a couple of times and taken it into work for a grandpa-style session once so far, and I can safely say it’s a pretty solid tea, although one better suited to gong fu.

The parameters here are for my most recent session. My work session with this was a little underwhelming—mostly smoke, not a whole lot of flavor or durability—and I was suspicious that I had underleafed, despite using my normal quantity of tea. Thus, this time, I went for broke on the leaf quantity, pretty well packing the gaiwan. I was rewarded for my efforts with tart, cherry-like flavors that gradually subsided to reveal undertones of softer vanilla. There’s definitely some smoke on this tea, though it’s mostly faded and present primarily when smelling the gaiwan lid; similarly, the camphor in the name seems to appear mostly in the aroma and maybe a bit in the finish.

In terms of less immediately tangible properties, the tea’s texture was nothing remarkable, although not too thin. There’s a calm but noticeable qi, and the caffeine levels seem to be pretty low, which is kind of a feature. The tea proved reasonably durable through the session, though it fell off a cliff towards the end—my steep time increments jumped from five seconds to thirty seconds or more pretty quickly.

For the price, this is a pretty solid tea. If you squint, you could think of it as a budget version of the YQH Teji, as the storage seems to have had similar effects. I’d definitely recommend sampling it, and it might be worth a cake.

I had set this bag aside of ‘2000 CNNP camphor EoT’ for when a specific friend came over and today was that day. Due to the darkness of the leaf, I really thought this was a ripe puerh which is why I put it to the side. The first brew came through and I said “wow, this tea has REALLY aged out fast because it resembles an old raw at this point” and so we drank it and I was mind blown. Excused myself to grab my phone, this is because I don’t have my phone with me when I do tea sessions with friends generally, and found out this was a raw!

Some strong tingling with this tea and serious aging on it. Really solid brisky brew each pour towards the end (being 3 hours, 18 steeps). Really enjoyable.

Story time: So we are outside drinking the end of this tea when this dog walks up to us and we are like ‘ugh, what the hell this is a big dog’. Staring at each other, minutes pass and this lady comes by with a Budweiser in her hand and just goes “that’s Luna, she’s a baby”. Then we realized the dog was staring scared that we would move rather than us being scared that the dog would move : )

So we are just chatting away about how she works with autistic children, which is her job since humans are so prone to knowing what people do for a living, we poured hot water in this clear glass device called a gaiwan. Now for the most past in Ohio, gongfu brewing is not a thing. She looks right at us and goes “what the fuck is that”. We both laugh and respond, “tea”. Then as always, we got some confused and somewhat concerned looks. So at this point it’s been a bit so she opens another Budweiser and we talk about poverty until someone brings her Chinese food and then she leaves.

It was beautiful. I don’t know who she was, but at 10pm at night she was able to just stand there and talk to us for an hour not even knowing who we were either as we poured hot water into this gaiwan thing and drank it over and over making remarks like ‘does your mouth tingle still near the roof of your mouth?’. Thinking about it, she was probably somewhat amused by the odd stuff going on with these two men talking about how their mouth feels when a liquid is introduced.